News from Cultural Collections, UON Library at the University of Newcastle, Australia

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In 2015, composer David Banney encountered artist Brett McMahon’s installation work for the first time and saw in it the dynamic interplay between symmetry and broken symmetry that he was seeking in his own music. It was then that they discovered the formal and conceptual affinities between their practices and so the present exhibition came to life.

The resulting body of new work is not so much a collaboration as a convergence. Here, two interlocutors share space and time, having departed from the same pre-defined point: the elaboration of six different works, each exploring a distinct texture or emotion. In crafting their separate pieces – McMahon of torn and brooding textiles and assemblages and Banney with surging, audible motifs – their paths converge, cross over, join together, diverge, and collide.

PLEASE JOIN THE ARTISTS FOR THE EXHIBITION OPENING AND A PERFORMANCE OF THE WORK BY THE CHRIST CHURCH CAMERATA AT THE UNIVERSITY GALLERY ON WED 9 AUGUST AT 6PM

We have just uploaded some photos of Paxton Colliery/Stanford Main Colliery to Living Histories @ UON. These are from the collection of Carole Knott, who has kindly allowed us to publish them. Our thanks to our community colleague, Barry Howard, for passing them on to us.

Were you a student at Newcastle University College between 1954 and 1964 (inc)? If so, you may like to read the Newcastle University College Students’ Association’s newspaper of the time – Opus. These were scanned by Davina Pellatt.

This blog, and the ones that will follow, look back over three and a half years to detail the preservation and conservation measures that returned the restored Birdwood flag to Newcastle’s Christ Church Cathedral in July 2017.

The posts will be presented as a narrative, relying on my own notes, images and memories and interspersing this narrative with comments from other members of the Birdwood Heritage Committee. The aim is to make an account that includes a variety of perspectives so that community members gain knowledge they can use in their own preservation projects.

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step…”

The Birdwood Flag’s preservation story is well described by applying Lao Tzu’s quotation above. The first definite steps in restoring the flag were made in November 2013 following a number of comments on the flag in previous years. The reality we faced was thousands of fragments of mostly reddish looking textile stored in a plastic back within a large cardboard box in a damp vault of the Cathedral.

The Birdwood Flag Before Conservation-2013

The other reality was the complete absence of any substantial funding and support that would be required for a major restoration. No group of people who might have the expertise to manage such a project could be identified and the one conservator at the University of Newcastle, myself, was so occupied with other projects, there was no time available, even for discussion or planning. Everything had to be established and negotiated from scratch. As a conservator, I knew this would involve the creation of a strategy for preservation of the flag to gauge the feasibility and practicality of the process. Only then could there be some negotiation between interested groups (including the University and the Cathedral) and then applications for resources, grants or other help through public and private benefactors.

As a principle of conservation, the level of material disintegration of an object is also considered. The Birdwood Flag’s utterly fragmented and delicate state would usually rule it out of consideration for restoration. The time for conservation would be judged as having expired so that any effort to restore it would be seen as pointless or worse still, as endangering the authenticity of the item. Indeed, such conservation would be perceived as blurring the lines between conservation and total re-construction of the item.

However a different principle of conservation argued against dismissing the idea of conservation and labelling the Birdwood Flag as a hopeless case. The significance of an item, be it art-work or monument, argues for or against the dedication of scarce resources to preserve it. Even so, the integrity of the item’s fabric is very important in deciding its significance. An item can only be considered as significant if enough of it remains to show what it is.

There was a Catch 22 involved with arguing the significance of the Birdwood Flag in its disintegrated state. To do this, some assurance was needed that it could be put together and made recognisable as a flag of a particular design, dimension and colour. A bag of confetti does not easily lend itself to such an assurance. Many people engaged in cultural heritage work experience such dilemmas. This is the moment when a project is often abandoned. However the Birdwood Flag was too important to be forgotten. It narrates the sacrifices of soldiers of a nation established only 15 years earlier during one of the most cruel and catastrophic wars in human history. Moreover the flag tells a story above and beyond a tale of WWI. Produced by a community yet official, flown on the battlefield yet returned to the community who built its own War Memorial and ‘laid up’ the flag there, this object provides important evidence for larger historical and social enquiries.

The Birdwood Flag has been restored and this blog is being published 31 July 2017; the day after the Birdwood Flag was re-hallowed in a special service to mark its return to Christ Church Cathedral, Newcastle. The brochure, Two Lives, tells the story of the one hundred years between the first making of the flag and its successful restoration and return. Further blogs will show the steps during three and a half years that brought us to this day.

Alex Marsden provided an overview of the original Catalyst grant application; what GLAM Peak asked for, what we actually received ($111K Catalyst/$39.9K in kind), and what we achieved, outlining the outputs from Stage 1, which included: a draft national framework for digital access to collections; principles to assist institutions of all shapes and sizes to achieve digital access for their holdings; a case study based toolkit; and a research report on international comparators.

She then provided an overview of our Stage II Catalyst application which was also successful in securing funding ($294.5K catalyst/ $66.2K GLAM Peak in kind/$150K Technology partners) Objectives included:

Focusing on the regional workshops, the plan discussed was to deliver 2 day workshops across 10 regional centres, with allocation of small grants to support participation; workshops to include training sessions on the toolkit, understanding the principles underpinning the Digital Access framework, demonstrations by tech and software companies and aggregator services to help build regional GLAM hubs of digital expertise and cross sector relationships.

To tackle the path towards creating Digital Access Plans at State and Territory Government levels, it was proposed to establish an Expert Working Group to:

review the current activities occurring in each State, and work with each to determine a ‘road map’, designed to provide a shared alignment of all existing activities in each state/territory, and looking where national alignments may happen

A timeframe, listing of technology and aggregator supporters and ideas from the last GLAM Peak meeting (Melbourne) as to how it could all happen (see powerpoint slides below), with potential locations for regional workshops.

“Strategies analysed came from Europe (28 in total), Canada and New Zealand. Surprisingly, there was little variation identified in the strategies from Europe. The Canadian and New Zealand strategies, although being of a later date than the European ones, also did not provide much variation.

The key findings also form the basis of the recommendations. The key findings are:
– National strategies for digitisation and preservation are created in response to cultural
policies set by Ministers of Culture
– Use of a Secretariat
– Competence Centres
– Preservation of digital materials as a high priority
– The existence (or development) of a national register of digitisation projects
– Developing Public-private partnerships (PPPs) for funding”

and Key Recommendations:

“Based on the research that has been undertaken, the following recommendations are made for how these findings might inform the development of digital access strategies at the state, territory and federal level in Australia.

Recommendation 1:
That Australian digital access to cultural collection state and territory strategies include consideration of appropriate agencies to oversee the delivery of the plans and to work together to co-ordinate a national approach.

Recommendation 2:
That state, territory and national strategies include high level guidance regarding the topics and type of material to be digitised.

Recommendation 3:
That consideration be given to creating a register of digitisation projects Australia-wide – refer Section 3.2 Canada.

Recommendation 4:
That state, territory and national strategies include consideration of the potential for PPPs in order to assist in the costs associated with extensive digitisation projects.

Recommendation 5:
That state, territory and national strategies include consideration of the establishment of Competence Centres (or Centres of Excellence) in various aspects of the digitisation and preservation processes and procedures.”

Discussion was then had over who could create and implement the State and Territory Digital Access Plans? Who would be able to champion beginning discussions in their respective States and Territory? This was seen as crucial, as according to the Key Findings, internationally, it was the Ministries of Culture that set the policies, with a competent Secretariat to make it happen.

It was agreed that Tasmania would lead the National charge in pulling together a State Digital Access Plan.

Frank Howarth then led a workshop discussion dealing with GLAM Peak’s future objectives, operations, ethos and priorities for 2017-2019 identifying Issues (i.e., what we wish to achieve) and Organisation (i.e., how are we going to do it).

He recapped on the history of the GLAM gatherings from the initial “tension in the room” meeting in Brisbane in June 2015, where everyone eventually realised that, “although we all had our differences, we all had much more in common”.

In the ensuing gatherings in Sydney we were able to come together to collectively advocate for Copyright Reform, TROVE funding support, and the 7 Point Plan to Digital Access at the last election proves that we can all work together at being a formidable force for the greater good of furthering open access to Australia’s cultural heritage for all peoples.

All groups came up with their particular issues. Our group’s issue was:

” How do we get everyone in GLAM in the same room?

It was felt that everyone in the sector has their own conferences to attend, and so having a joint conference in 2020 would be a fantastic way to get everyone under the same tent. This idea was already proposed by me back in March 2016 following the Melbourne GLAM Digital Access meeting 25 February 2016.

Other issues raised included emphasising the role of culture in creating a civil society, significance of data literacy, implications of creative industries, making digital access relevant at the local level, advocacy for the value of culture, and advocacy in general, essentials for the survival of human beings, clarification to the wider community as to what GLAM is and does.

With regards to Organisation, there was identified, the need to engage with the States as well as Peak groups; the sustainability of relying on volunteers such as Sue, Alex and Kate to keep the GLAM show on the road; the importance of being able to employ administrative assistance through Wendy and Lucinda; the need of Champions for the State Digital Access Plans; identifying evidence for the role of culture in creating civil societies; investment and its impacts through advocacy.

the TROVE roadshows that had well over 1000+ participants across the metropolitan and regional cities and towns of Australia.

$16.4M received in funding to create a new digital business model, with the proviso that there would be no more funding, and were looking into a membership model as a way to fund it, with help from the States, whilst still keeping access to TROVE completely OPEN and FREE.

National Digital Deposit Network. With changes to Copyright legislation, more digital publications are now being collected under legal deposit provisions and planning is underway for a national collaborative approach led by the National Digital Deposit Network (NDDN) steering group. The National and State Libraries Australasia (NSLA) is a leading library sector collaboration that is supporting it. TROVE is the delivery mechanism.

They are currently mapping TROVE, but it is becoming more like an atlas. Everyone outside thinks TROVE is the National Library of Australia (NLA), while everyone in the NLA think TROVE is everyone else. He ended by wishing to invite GLAM Perk to Canberra for the next gathering to focus on TROVE to discuss: It’s Your TROVE; How can TROVE be more useful?; Different views of TROVE; Next Steps.

Sue McKerracher (ALIA) provided an update on the new changes to copyright law:

changed copyright term provisions, ending perpetual copyright for unpublished works and providing a fixed term for works whose authors are unknown, including anonymous works and orphan works. From 1 January 2019 copyright will be 70 years from the death of author. Pre-1939 will be free of copyright provisions.

streamlined educational statutory licences and allow material to be included in online examinations

implement Australia’s obligations under the Marrakesh Treaty so that whenever copyrighted content that is not available in an accessible format can be converted into the required format by a person with a disability or someone acting on their behalf.

Sue also encouraged everyone to cook again to celebrate these important copyright reforms on 31 July – to mark the two-year anniversary since librarians around the country took part in this act of civil disobedience.

Robin Hirst then provided a summary of the day, an agreement on next steps and thanked our hosts and attendees.

END OF GLAM MEETING

At the conclusion there was a tour of the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) by Mary Lijnzaad.

Cow on route to MONA in Cattle Class

Red Ensign at rear of MONA vessel

On route to MONA in Cattle Class

Red Ensign at rear of MONA vessel

On route to MONA

Crane building new addition to MONA, inspired by the PHAROS Light House of ancient Alexandria

Who lives up there?

Art Installation adjacent to Sidney Nolan’s Snake

Installation inspired by Tim’s Vermeer (2013)

Installation inspired by Tim’s Vermeer (2013)

Each and every vagina was hand crafted individually, and is not a plaster cast!

We have hundreds of audio and video files on our Living Histories @ UON site. It can be very helpful to have these files captioned so that listeners can jump to the parts of the recordings that interest them the most.

If you would care to help us in our endeavours, we have provided some instructions. If you find errors in the the documentation, feel something needs changing or if something isn’t clear, please contact us.